More About Dan Shapiro and the Glowforge CNC Laser Cutter (Video #2)

Video More About Dan Shapiro and the Glowforge CNC Laser Cutter (Video #2) 25

Posted by Roblimo on Friday May 29, 2015 @04:13PM from the tom-swift-and-his-cnc-laser-cutter-would-make-a-great-book-title dept.

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Yesterday Glowforge Co-Founder and CEO Dan Shapiro told us that the Glowforge machine is a CNC laser cutter and engraver, not a 3-D Printer -- even though the first words on Glowforge's main page are, "The First 3D Laser Printer," a description Dan says is there for people not familiar with things like laser cutters and 3-D printers, who want to call the Glowforge a 3-D printer even though people who know about this stuff know what it is at first glance. He also talks about his previous startup, Robot Turtles; what it is, how it came to be, and why kids like it so much. This interview is worth watching (or reading) for the Robot Turtles section alone, especially if you have children or are thinking about designing board games for kids.

Slashdot: I want you to talk a little bit about the materials that Glowforge can deal with. You mentioned a sort of a range is let’s say printer paper you might pick up at Office Depot, all the way at least up to leather because you’ve shown that. What are the upper bounds, what’s the thickest thing that you could deal with what you plan to sell as a stock product?

Dan Shapiro : So you will be able to cut 1/4 inch hard woods and we’re experimenting with up to 1/2 inch. So stay tuned. Most leathers cut great , some of them are really thick, oil impregnated stuff can be a little trickier to get through and take a little – take longer time. And on the acrylic side 1/4 inch is great and we’re playing around with 1/2 inch and even more. In terms of engraving anything , another unique thing about the Glowforge is, you can take a commercial product like I don't know, the Macbook or your phone, drop it in there, o and then you can engrave it. I mean, when you do that, you get a 1000 DPI precision. And the ability to vary the powers so you can actually engrave in greyscale. So the ability to go and personalize your stuff with those engravings is really neat, because that’s as simple as grabbing a bitmap out of Photoshop or a picture that you had taken, drag it over and put it on to whatever sort of material you’re working with.

Slashdot: And by describing it as a 3D printer, as opposed to a laser cutter, I guess one aspect that is not true with -- let’s say a conventional 3D printer that’s using one of the filament media – is you can mix materials that are widely different you can say here, here is a thing that's made out of leather and wood and acrylic sort of, mix and match things because you’re taking like you say, flat things and turning them into surfaces, curved or whatever shape you want.

Dan: Yeah. And because I am sure everybody watching this knows the proper terminology, I don’t want to make any bones about it, it’s a CNC laser cutter and engraver, what we found is that when we talk to people who are unfamiliar with this space and are trying to wrap their head around it, they kept calling it a laser printer and I would say no, it’s CNC laser cutter engraver, and they'd say, yeah, I want one of those laser printers. And so kind of put my head together with my co-founders like how can we describe this in a way that’s going to explain what it does, and the notion of a laser printer that prints 3D things really resonated with the folks who don’t understand what lasers can do already. But fundamentally that’s what it’s about, it’s about being able to create use things that are beautiful materials not just limited to plastic or you know whatever your single or dual extruder heads can manage. And really create something that you’re going to use every day because we have a bunch of 3D printers in the office that we actually use in prototyping and we use send some stuff out for large objects that we can’t print in-house. 3D printers are fantastic and we use them all the time. But there is nothing that I carry around with me every day that’s just a piece of plastic, stone, glass, we' got some really cool stuff with food too. When you do a 1000 DPI intricate filigree cut on Sushi seaweed it looks incredible. And when you engrave a Chocobar which by the way the secret is you put it in a freezer first and get it really cold and then you go engrave the Chocobar it looks amazing and you give that to somebody for their birthday they put flip out those on top of birthday presents a little personal chocolate bar. You do want to use a separate laser for food than you do for non-food stuff, but the laser kitchen is really cool.

Slashdot: Now we’ve talked a little bit about materials and to some degree about the gut of the machine can we talk a little bit about the flow you mentioned and you made it sound it is as simple as hitting the print on a design and you mentioned Inkscape as a good starting point for coming up with the actual shapes you’re going to cut can you walk through a little bit if you have a shape that you want to make how does it work, do you put it on an SD card that goes into slot on the machine and that reads a file from that or do you have USB connection, what is the at least a card that's?

Dan: It’s really fun, the machine has one button play/pause that’s it. It’s native Wi-Fi so you get it on your local network. And then you go to whatever you favorite design package is and we have plug-ins for Inkscape, Illustrator and so on and so you go send those – from there you say send to Glowforge or you can open up a web page to Glowforge and just drag a jpeg on there if nothing else. And then you get to see preview, make any adjustments that you want. If you’re using any material you can say this is the material I am using and then you hit print, and a little light on the device starts blinking and you hit it and away it goes. And you can do that by the way, you can do the web interface from a tablet, you can do it from a phone, you can do it from a laptop. In fact, you can do it from just about anywhere. So we imagine some folks are going to call their local maker space and say, would you put a piece of plywood on the board, on the thing for me and get it loaded up and say go, and then the operator says yep here we go, come by and pick it up, that will be $10.

Slashdot: One of our former editors was talking yesterday about the fact that his phone recently did not have a printer driver and this kind of sidesteps the idea of a device-specific driver by using a webpage.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. And once you’ve created something, it’s going to sit in your library, so you can just call up from your phone again and say, yeah I just want another one of those go, go, go. It is natively connected all the time. So, if you don’t have an Internet connection in your shop, if you are up and about , you are going to either have to find a mobile spot or this won’t work. But we are really committed to making this available. And by the way, because some people at your web service may go, are you going to start charging a subscription fee? We’re committed to making the thing usable without a subscription free. We may at some point wind up saying, oh there is some like super premium features we’ll offer, but we want to be sure that you can always cut with a machine that you’ve got, with what you’ve got out of the box.

Slashdot: You mentioned a plug-in to use with certain software packages to create your files. What’s the native file format if it makes sense in this context is it SVG?

Dan: Yeah. I mean, internally we use SVGs, but we go and convert from whatever you send us into SVG.

Slashdot: Okay. Now, what I'd like to do Dan is skip a little bit from Glowforge because it sounds like a really cool product that I think people are going to at least want to see in person when it’s available to a somewhat more abstract and more general question which is – and setting aside what may or may not happen with Glowforge but you’ve been involved with one of the most impressive Kickstarter projects. Can you talk a little bit about Robot Turtles? How did that come to be? And what was it like to actually go from a fairly small requested amount to the incredible response you got? How did that happen? What do you attribute that to?

Dan: So Robot Turtles started out as an inkjet printer, a pair of scissors and a Saturday with my twins who at the time were four years old.

Slashdot: And before we go any further, can you actually give the precis for those who don’t know what Robot Turtles is about?

Dan: Yeah, so Robot Turtles is a board game you play with kids as young as 3. So they basically get stacks of cards in front of them with commands, they build a program out of these cards and then you as the grownup play the computer and run the program for them, and if they can get the Turtle the jewel they win.

Slashdot: Was the inspiration for turtles the use of the old ground turtles from Logo?

Dan: Yeah, this – it was actually the weird intersection of two lines of thought, one was, isn’t it strange that every computer language ultimately renders out to ASCII text. That seems philosophical, I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way that my kids who can’t read yet could learn programming fundamentals.

Slashdot: Oh, I think – everyone who has been in a Logo classroom remembers the idea of sketching out and then what if I go forward and how do I make the nice kaleidoscope.

Dan: Yep, exactly. And so they are doing this in their head and they’re thinking really hard and then you get to run and make funny noises and you bump in to a wall and everybody laughs, and the thing about it -- the secret that I totally didn’t mean to have have happened – when I started playing with my kids I realized is that they are bossing you around. And bossing around grownups is the most fun thing in the entire world.

Slashdot: Oh?

Dan: Yeah, exactly. And then what I realized is the reason that that’s happening is because the difference between the way I think about the difference between a programmer and somebody who isn’t a programmer is somebody who bosses around computers than somebody who isn’t a programmer somebody who has to learn computers. It’s like who is the master and who is the servant. And so I wanted my kids from the very outset, I don't care if they turn out as programmers or not but I wanted them to think of computers as tools that they bend to their will, and that they are the boss of, and so it was really important to me that their first exposure to programming be one of like they are in control.

And I've had a lot of parents be like, 'Wait, the kids don’t move the pieces, you have to move the pieces.' That seems weird, but the reason that is, is because they get to boss you around, you never have to tell them they broke the rules, causing you to look and run into a wall, it doesn’t work, they just get to try stuff and see what happens, so this is very experiential learning. There is a bug card, so if they make a mistake they tap the bug card and safely move back for free. And again I went back to like what’s the difference between when I see people who like jump into computers and those who don’t, people who jump into computers aren't afraid of breaking things.

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